I recently got a beta account to the upcoming Compete.com Search Analytics tool. I am not sure of their pricing yet, but Jay Meattle, from Compete.com, told me "the price points will be extremely attractive to small business owners."

You can get leading category based keywords, top competitors for a given keyword (exact or broad match), compare competing sites head to head on keywords, and get the breakdown of traffic sent to any website.

How Accurate is Compete.com?

Their model of data collection is going to make their data more accurate for frequent search terms and larger sites, but I tested their keyword data against some of my smaller sites and it was surprisingly accurate.

How to Clone Smaller Competitors

This is yet another way authority sites will pick off smaller competing sites. It is a simple process. If your site is one of the most authoritative sites in your space you can clean up.

Use Google's site targeting ads stats to check what sites are running AdSense and getting a lot of traffic (you don't even need to buy ads on them to do this)

Go to Compete.com to get the top keyword phrases competing sites rank for and create content targeting the same keywords. You can also run the keywords through Google's Traffic Estimator to sort the keywords by Google's value estimates.

Beyond that, you can run Google's site targeted ads or general contextual AdSense placement reports to find out what pages are the most popular on competing sites, and then create content covering the same topics.

Lowbrow webmasters are fast becoming the outsourced market research department for bigger, more technologically advanced, and cash flush companies.

The Effect of Better Competitive Data

All of these analytic services are going to increase the value of domain authority (since it can be easily leveraged for greater profit) and force webmasters to move themselves up the value chain (since models like AdSense give away too much competitive data, especially when combined with Compete.com).

Other Ways to Use Compete.com

Compete can be used to see how strong a brand is in its field. The top keyword in the credit card category is Capital One. Both www.capitalone.com and capitalone.com are also in the top 5 keywords. They are obviously a leader in that space. You can also see what percent of a website's traffic originates from its brand related keywords.

You can search for a broad match phrase to see how established your site is inside a vertical, how consolidated a vertical is, and how much potential upside you have by increasing your share of search traffic.

Compete can also show you the if a competing site is heavily reliant on a few strong keywords or if their traffic distribution is wider. This can be used to see sites worth investing in (especially if you understand search relevancy algorithms) or sites which have a lot of risk and are worth avoiding.

I had a look that that compete tool and it seems to get data from toolbar usage. i.e. you download a toolbar and it takes data from it.

it reminds me of comscore and hitwise and the like, as in small userbase, skewed data for all smaller traffic sites and really only suitable for the US market

Of course I stand to be corrected on my facts. Myoverriding impression : useful, but not something I would necessarily say was a godsend unlike something like seodigger whicih shows you the actual kwyword footprint of a given site.

Hi Christopher
I may do something like that soon. I was a bit unsure with how much data Compete wanted me to show though, as they are in beta and the final product may be a bit different than where it is at right now.

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Anna C: Hello Jacob. Thanks for contacting Google AdWords. How may I help you today?

Jacon: If I use the new pay per performance bids and one of my competitors sends traffic to my website, will they know the conversion rate of my website?

Anna C: Your conversion rates are private and within your account that only you and whomever you've granted access to your account can access.

Anna C: Can you please explain to my how you believe your competitors may gain access to this information?

Jacon: one moment

Jacon: I would assume affiliates delivering traffic to my website being paid on a per performance basis would be able to do the math and calculate how many visitors they send my way with how much they get paid and come to the conclusion of my websites conversion rate

Anna C: They would be able to figure out the conversion rate of their own AdWords account or whatever method they used to drive traffic to your site, however they would not be able to derive the overall conversion rate of your website since they won't be able to access all of the conversion for your entire site.

Jacon: But they definately could know the conversion rate of the traffic they deliver

Anna C: Yes, since they are driving traffic to your site knowing the conversion rate of the traffic deliver would help them deliver more favorable traffic to your site.

Anna C: But they would only know this sort of data for the traffic they drive.

Jacon: I would want an affiliate to have that data but it would be way to risky to chance competitors using it to find my conversion rate and copy my site if they like what they see